Page 15 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Introduction 3
has put it, television institutions ‘are obliged not only to speak about an audience but—
crucially, for them—to talk to one as well: they need not only to represent audiences but
to enter into relations with them’ (emphasis in original). But it is not easy for these
institutions to assess and control these relations. For them, the television audience is an
‘invisible mass’, as it were, hidden behind the millions of dispersed closed doors of
private homes, virtually unmanageable and inaccessible to the outsider. Therefore, the
institutions concerned must produce what Hartley has called ‘invisible fictions’ of the
audience, more or less well-circumscribed discursive figures of ‘television audience’,
which allow the institutions to know, or at least get a sense of whom they must enter into
relations with. How the television audience is known within television institutions, then,
articulates the way in which they attempt to weave actual audiences into the mechanisms
of their own reproduction. Various forms of institutional knowledge about the audience
are by definition interested knowledge, inextricably linked with various forms of
institutional power.
We can also put it differently. Quite obviously, before there was television, there was
no such thing as a television audience. The television audience then is not an ontological
given, but a socially-constituted and institutionally-produced category. This means that
the notion of television audience as such derives its primary relevance only in relation to
the specific institutional arrangements within which television technology is socially
exploited and used. In other words, ‘television audience’ refers first of all to a structural
position in a network of institutionalized communicative relationships: a position located
at the receiving end of a chain of practices of production and transmission of audiovisual
material through TV channels. It is within the constraints of this structural position that
concrete people become actual audiences, whatever this means further in social, cultural
and psychological terms. And it is never beyond the epistemoiogical limits set by this
structural position that the institutional point of view conceptualizes ‘television
audience’.
In Part I, which forms the theoretical prelude to Parts II and III, I will sketch a general
outline of how the institutional point of view gives rise to the production of knowledge in
which ‘television audience’ is constructed as an objectified category of others to be
controlled. At an epistemoiogical level, this construction is made possible by aggregating
all people supposedly belonging to the category into a distinct ‘taxonomic collective’,
that can be known as such. This operation is clearest in the institutional context of
commercial television, where the practice that has come to be called ‘audience
measurement’ has served from the beginning as the central instrument to come to such a
construction. Through audience measurement, the commercial television industry has
equipped itself with a basic mechanism to get to know the audience in a way that suits the
industry’s interests—a development which, not surprisingly, originated in the United
States. By the 1990s, audience measurement has become a technologically-advanced
practice in which enormous amounts of money and energy are invested. In Part II, I will
discuss audience measurement as a prime instance for the objectifying, othering, and
controlling kind of knowledge that circulates within the institutional context of American
commercial television.
But technologically-advanced audience measurement has also come to play an
important role in West European attempts to supply public service television institutions
with knowledge about the audience that they deem necessary. Broadcasters, policy